It being that time of year when night starts coming earlier and earlier, ghoulies and ghosties start showing up in the stores, and Texas finally starts to receive cooler temperatures, I thought it would be fun to look at some of Robert E. Howard’s favorite supernatural and horror tales that he was told or learned about. Not horror fiction, but the “real” ghost tales and weird stuff that folks tell around a campfire. The old “a friend of a friend heard this” stuff. Of course, during Howard’s life, Halloween had not yet begun to develop its modern traditions of kids dressing up and going door to door begging for treats, or adults having parties. He never really wrote or told something as a “Halloween” story as it was just a day of the week to him. However, as most Howard fans know, he did write of “things that go bump in the night” in his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, trading tales and legends with each other in an unofficial “can-you-top-this” way. Most of us know that Howard’s “Pigeons From Hell” and “Black Canaan” yarns came from spooky stories he had been told as a child from relatives and family friends, but there are several other tales he talks about with Lovecraft that you may not know of, and which fit in perfectly in getting you ready for Halloween.

Eerie Places

Lovecraft mentioned in a letter to Howard the story of a rock that bleeds at night. Howard wrote back his thoughts on the legend and of his knowledge of another rock:

The legends you cite are extremely interesting, especially the one about the rock which bleeds in the light of the moon. That is a particularly fantastic touch, so strangely fantastic that it must have some basis of fact, though doubtless the fact is far removed in substance from the details of the myth. It seems to me that the more wildly fantastic a tale is, the more likelihood there is for its being grounded in reality one way or another. The average human is so unimaginative that the highest flights of fantasy are beyond his power to create out of nothing. The bleeding rock reminds me of a similar Irish legend, that of Raimreach Ruadh, wife of Goban Saer, in Bantry. (Lovecraft, ca. Oct. 1930)

Howard returns to the Irish bleeding rock, Raimreach Ruadh, and fills Lovecraft in on its story in a later letter:

The legend of the bleeding rock in Ireland, is briefly, that Saint Moling changed the wife of Goban Saer, and a companion into stones; these stones are pointed out in Curraun townland, parish of Saint Mullins, in the barony of Bantry, County Wexford, and are known as Raimreach Ruadh; once, it is said, a blacksmith cut three grooves in the larger stone to blast it, whereupon blood oozed from the grooves, and the people decided that Red Raimreach was still alive and her blood circulating through the stone to which she had been changed.(Lovecraft, ca. Nov. 1930)

In a series of letters, Howard talks about a “Murder Ranch” that he knows about in Texas. The idea of it would fit right in, if it hasn’t already been used, in one of today’s horror movies about serial killers:

For instance, I have been repeatedly urged to make an article or tale of a certain murder-ranch which lies several miles west of here, and on which, some thirty years ago, a series of unspeakably ghastly crimes were enacted, and on which skeletons are every now and then found to this day. However, I have not the slightest idea of putting it on paper — more especially as one of the men who committed some of those crimes is still living and at large!(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

And further:

As to the murder-ranch I mentioned, such ranches were fairly common in Texas during an earlier day. The owners would keep a cow-puncher working for perhaps a year without pay, then when he demanded his money, he was driven away; if he showed fight, he was shot down and his body thrown into a gully or an old well. This particular ranch lies some miles west of this town and is now in different hands. The old man who owned the ranch, was, I have heard, of particularly repellent aspect and more dangerous than a rattle-snake. His worst crime, at least I consider it was, was the murder of a servant’s baby; its noise irritated him and he dashed its brains out against the ranch house wall. He lived to be very old and was doubtless partly insane in the latter part of his life.

His son now has a ranch some hundreds of miles west of here, and some twelve or fifteen years ago killed a Mexican, sewed the corpse up in a cow-hide and flung it out on the prairie to rot. The Cattlemen’s Association sent out a detective — just why so much trouble was taken about a Mexican I cannot understand, unless he was some way connected with the Association — and this detective, playing the part of a deaf mute, worked for months on the murderer’s ranch and finally got full evidence. No one would have thought of looking into the cow-hide, for it merely appeared that a cow’s carcass was rotting out there on the plains. The killer was brought into court and got a sentence of two or three years, though I cannot say as to whether he ever served his time or not. The last I heard of him, he was prospering in the western country.(Lovecraft, ca. Oct. 1930)

Finally, Howard mentions a bit of folklore about the dangers travelers faced when stopping at certain 1-star motels:

The tale of the murdered traveller is, as you say, quite common in all sections and reminds me of one, very old, which was once quite prevalent in the Southwest and which must be a garbled version of some legend brought over from Scotland. It deals with three brothers stopping at a lonely cabin high up in the mountains, kept by an evil old woman and her half-idiot sons. In the night they cut the throats of the older brothers, but the younger escapes. Now enters the really fantastic part of the tale. The younger brother flees across the mountains on his fleet horse and the old woman mounts and pursues, carrying a cane held high in her hand. Again and again the boy eludes her, but each time she holds the cane high and sings a sort of incantation:

“Sky-high, caney,

“Where’s Toddywell?

“Way over on the Blue-ridgey mountains!

“Haw back!”

Perhaps in the original tale, the answer is given by the cane. Anyway, the cane points out the way the boy has taken and the pursuit is renewed. Eventually the fugitive gains “a pass in the mountains” and escapes. When a youngster I always shuddered at the mental picture that tale brought up — the lean and evil hag with her lank hair flying in the wind, riding hard across the dark mountains under the star-flecked skies, gripping her gory knife and halting on some high ridge to chant her fantastic incantation. But it is but one of the many bloody tales that once flourished in the Scotch-Irish settlements of the Southwest.(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

This tale certainly looks like it had an influence on Howard’s “Pigeons From Hell” story, to a degree.

Witches and People with Paranormal Powers

Howard and Lovecraft talked about witches and witchcraft over a few letters. Lovecraft told Howard about the Pennsylvania Dutch Country witches, which Howard found fascinating. He replied to Lovecraft:

What a deformed branch of the tree of progress that witch-craft phase of Puritan New England became! To what basis do you attribute it — religious fanaticism stretched beyond human boundaries and producing abnormalities, or an inherent abnormality in the people that produced the fanaticism? To me the aspect of that age and its people is beyond all comprehension. I frankly cannot begin to fathom the dark mental perversity that brought such grisly Chimerae into being. A fantastic idea presents itself to me persistently, that the littoral had something to do with it; perhaps the cold New England winters that cooped people into houses and turned back the pages of time to the ice-fringed shores and snowy forests these peoples ancestors knew before they came into England. We know that the Scandinavian peoples are prone to dark brooding and paranoidal impulses. Can it not be that the cold, overcast skies, the brooding hills and dark mysterious woods brought forth a latent insanity lurking in these persecuted and creed ridden people? Lingering racial memories and superstitious fears breaking from the long sleep of centuries to take on monstrous shapes.(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

Later:

I found your remarks on witch-craft highly interesting. It was not until a few years ago that I realized that such a cult really did exist in former times — discovered this by reading an article by Joseph McCabe on the subject. Your comments threw a good deal more light on the subject. A wealth of fiction could be written about it — especially about the time that European civilization seemed on the verge of crumbling before its insidious undermining. You are probably right in believing that the New England witch-craze was caused by members of the cult — probably trying to revive the old ways in the New World.(Lovecraft, ca. Oct. 1930)

And, finally in a November 1930 letter,

The witch-cult offers great possibilities, in itself, and a writer need not tie himself down to the actual limits of the thing. Why should the cult be merely a fertility worship? Why should it not have deeper, darker significance, dating from pre-human memories? — In fiction, at least!

This talk of witches infesting an area and holding to their rituals along with the bleeding rock stories Howard and Lovecraft talked about at the same time may have inspired Howard to write his great horror story “The Black Stone”, which was created around this time.

Continuing on the theme of witches, Howard talked about a woman that he knew when he was a young boy, and his family was living in East Texas:

Speaking of witches reminds me of an old woman I knew in my early childhood in the “piney woods”. She went bare-footed, was generally accompanied by a large flock of geese, gathered up manure to fertilize her garden, in her bare hands, and was generally looked on as a witch — tolerantly, to be sure, but the niggers were much afraid of her. One day she put a death-curse on a playmate of mine and nearly frightened him into a fit. And perhaps it was as well for her that superstition was not as rife as in former ages, because shortly afterward the child died.(Lovecraft, ca. Oct. 1930)

I have already talked about a woman Howard knew, Mrs. Crawford, whose surviving a Comanche raid influenced parts of Howard’s “Beyond the Black River” story. She also exhibited what would be considered powers of ESP today. Continuing in the letter where he wrote of her Comanche ordeal, Howard writes of an incident that happened involving her and her second husband:

Mrs. Brown was Mrs. Crawford when I knew her. A strange woman, and one whom the countryside looked on as a “medium”; a seer of visions and a communer with the dead. After she married Crawford, he went forth one day to look for his horses, just as her former husband had. Again it was a cold drear day, gloomed with grey clouds. Crawford rode away awhile before sundown and she heard his horse’s hoofs dwindle away on the hard barren ground. The sun sank and the air grew cold and brittle. On the wings of a howling blue blizzard night shut down and Crawford did not come. Mrs. Crawford retired after awhile, and as she lay in the darkness, with the wild wind screaming outside, suddenly a strange feeling came over her which she recognized as the forerunner of a vision. The room filled suddenly with a weird blue light, the walls melted away, distance lost its meaning and she was looking through the hills, the long stretches of mesquite, the swirling blue distances and the night, upon the open reaches of prairie. Over the prairie blew an unearthly wind, and out of the wind came a luminous cloud and out of the cloud a horseman, riding hard. She recognized her husband, face set grimly, rifle in his grasp, and on him a blue army coat such as she had never seen before. He rode in utter silence; she did not hear the thunder of his ride, but beneath his horse’s hoofs that spurned the hard earth, the dead prairie grass bent and the flints spat fire. Whether he rode alone she could not tell, for the luminous cloud closed in before and behind and he rode in the heart of the cloud. Then as a mist fades the vision faded and she was alone in the dark room with the wind screaming about the house and the wolves howling along the gale. Three days later Crawford came home, riding slowly on a weary horse. The blizzard had blown itself out; the cold sunlight warmed the shivering prairies and Crawford wore no coat, as when he had ridden away. He had not found his horses, but he had found the tracks of the raiders who had taken them, and while examining them, a band of settlers had swept past on the trail, shouting for him to follow. And he had followed and in the teeth of the freezing blizzard they had harried the marauders to the very banks of Red River, emptying more than one saddle in that long running fight. She asked about the coat, the blue army coat she had seen in the vision, and he replied with surprize that he had stopped at a settler’s house long enough to borrow the coat, and had returned it as he rode back by, returning from the chase.(Lovecraft, ca. Oct. 1931)

Bizarre Creatures

Howard loved his Gaelic heritage, and talked about some of the legendary creatures the Scots and Irish had. In a letter to Wilfrid Blanch Talman, the editor of the Texaco Co. magazine, Howard mentions a few of them when discussing two weird stories Talman had written and sent to Howard to read:

              I hope you’ll use Irish legends in other tales, and certainly, there’s a broad and fertile field there, and a whole gamut of supernaturals from the Payshtha, the dragon of the lake, to the amorous gean-canach with his winning ways with milk-maids. The most of the shiagh are whimsical and fantastic but some are grisly and weird, survivals, perhaps, of Danish legendry.(Talman, ca. Oct. 1931)

The Payshtha was a dragon or giant eel that would guard treasures, sometimes in lakes or rivers. The next creature, the Gean-canach, which is spelled Gancanagh now, is a fairy Incubus that would seduce women. Lovecraft and Howard also talked about the Moonack, which like the Jackalope, whipsnake, and the Hodag, is a particularly mean, vicious type of woodchuck of American legend.

The last interesting creatures that Howard and Lovecraft discussed were the whippoorwills and owls and their ability to foretell deaths:

I remember the idea of whippoorwills and psychopomps in your “Dunwich Horror” and how I was struck with the unique grisliness of the notion; did the Puritans bring the belief with them from England or did it spring up in the New World?(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

Howard relates the story of his Grandfather, Colonel G. W. Ervin, and his dealings with revenge-seeking whippoorwills in a later letter:

Colonel Ervin once owned a great deal of property in what is now a very prosperous section of Dallas, and might have grown with the town, but for the whippoorwills. They almost drove him crazy with their incessant calling, and though he was a kindly man with beasts and birds, and killed men with less remorse than he killed animals, in a fit of passion one night, he shot three whippoorwills; it was flying in the face of tradition and he quickly regretted it, but the damage was done. According to legend, you know, human life must pay for the blood of a whippoorwill, and soon the Colonel’s family began to die, at the average of one a year, exactly as the old black people prophesied. He stuck it out five years and then, with five of his big family dead, he gave it up. No one ever accused him of cowardice; he hacked his way alone, through a cordon of Phil Sheriden’s cavalry-men; but the whippoorwills licked him. He sold his Dallas property for a song, went west and bought a sheep-ranch. Of course, Dallas was a swamp then, and very sickly. Still, it’s not wise to kill a whippoorwill. Screech owls are about as bad; but you can stop a screech owl’s screeching by taking off your left shoe, turning it upside down, and then putting it back on at once. A funny thing, but it works every time. Of course, the owl only screeches so long, and by the time you’ve made up your mind to try the old superstition, and have done it, the owl is through and flown off.(Lovecraft, ca. Nov. 1930)

Ghosts

Now, we come to the really spooky parts of the letters most appropriate for the season, Howard’s tales of ghost stories he had been told.

Returning to Mrs. Crawford again, Howard continues talking about her haunted home:

Many a time, as a child have I listened to her telling strange tales of old times when white men and red men locked in a last struggle for supremacy. I wandered around her old ranch-house in awe. It was not the memories of Indian forays that made me shiver — it was the strange tales the country folk told — of doors in the old ranch-house that opened and closed without human agency, of an old chair rocking to and fro in the night in an empty room. In this chair Crawford had spent his last days. Men swore that the chair rocked at night, as he had rocked, and his old spittoon clinked regularly, as it had clinked in his lifetime when he rocked, chewing tobacco, and from time to time spat.(Lovecraft, ca. Oct. 1931)

Headless Ghosts

Howard in several of his letters talks about headless ghosts or disembodied heads. Here they are:

“Aunt” Mary Bohannon’s Tale

The person Howard heard the basic plot for his “Pigeons From Hell” story from was his family’s cook, Mary Bohannon, while the Howards were living in the East Texas town of Bagwell when Howard was a little boy. “Aunt Mary”, as Howard called her, told him several stories of ghostly happenings that Howard repeated to Lovecraft. One of the many spooky tales Aunt Mary told young Robert involved a headless ghost:

She (Mary Bohannon) told many tales, one which particularly made my hair rise; it occurred in her youth. A young girl going to the river for water, met, in the dimness of dusk, an old man, long dead, who carried his severed head in one hand. This, said Aunt Mary, occurred on the plantation of her master, and she herself saw the girl come screaming through the dusk, to be whipped for throwing away the water-buckets in her flight.(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

Wilfrid B. Talman

Returning to the letter to Talman previously mentioned, Howard talks about one of Talman’s stories, “Midnight Coach” and its ghost that he knows of:

In the other [Talman’s “Midnight Coach”] I was much interested in your use of the old Irish legend of the coiste-codnar and the dullahans. Which last, by the way, is more Scandinavian than Irish, and was brought into Ireland, no doubt, by invading Vikings, who, in the grim cold lands of their nativity, were accustomed to behead corpses lest their ghosts be too strong, or perhaps to prevent them becoming vampires. Doubtless the tale of headless horrors stalking through the rolling grey mists on the bare fens gave rise to such legends.(Talman, ca. Oct. 1931)

In his critique of Talman’s story, Howard mentions the “Coiste-Codnar” and “Dullahan”. The accepted spelling of the first is “Coiste Bodhar”, and both ghosts deal with headless spectres. The Coiste Bodhar is the black coach drawn by four black horses which are managed by a headless driver, popularly depicted in the Disney film, “Darby O’Gill and the Little People”. The Dullahan is a particularly scary headless horseman. Sometimes the driver of the Coiste Bodhar is identified as a Dullahan. Both are harbingers of impending death, like the more popularly known Banshee. The Coiste Bodhar always leaves with a newly departed soul, while the Dullahan is more like the Banshee in announcing the coming death. Interestingly, according to folklore, the Dullahan has his head with him, which he uses to see by holding it aloft. Both spirits stop at the home where their fare is at, and the Dullahan will call out the person’s name. In an interesting aside, according to the website, Dullahan.com, the Dullahan is the embodiment of the Celtic god, Crom Dubh, or Black Crom. It would have been fascinating to see if Howard knew about this aspect when writing his Conan stories. You could almost imagine the story he would have written about Crom finally taking an interest in Conan and appearing as a Dullahan. After reading this letter, I certainly would like to find and read Talman’s “Midnight Coach” story based on Howard’s brief description of it as well as the other story Talman sent, “The Heads at Gywry”!

“The Wagon”

Howard’s grandmother told him a tale that would probably get her reported to Child Protective Services today:

              As a child my hair used to stand straight up when she would tell of the wagon that moved down wilderness roads in the dark of the night, with never a horse drawing it — the wagon that was full of severed heads and dismembered limbs …(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

Chimney Ghost

In a September letter to Lovecraft, Howard briefly mentions a ghost that he had heard about, but doesn’t know much more of, the Headless Chimney Ghost:

              There is a legend that was quite popular in its day in the Southwest, which I am unable to place. That is, I cannot decide whether it is one of the usual inconsistencies negro-folk-lore often displays, or a deliberate Irish invention, intended to be a bull. That is the one about the headless woman, who strange to say, was often heard grinding her teeth in the angle of the chimney, and whose long hair flowed down her back!(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

Almost sounds like the Japanese female Yuurei ghosts, most popularly depicted in the Ringu and Juon movies.

Howard’s Grandmother’s and “Aunt Mary” Bohannon’s Tales

The two people that had the most influence on Howard’s interest in the supernatural were his grandmother, and his family’s cook, Aunt Mary Bohannon. About his grandmother, the one who told him the lovely tale about the wagon, Howard said:

But no negro ghost-story ever gave me the horrors as did the tales told by my grandmother. All the gloominess and dark mysticism of the Gaelic nature was hers, and there was no light and mirth at her. Her tales showed what a strange legion of folk-lore grew up in the Scotch-Irish settlements of the Southwest, where transplanted Celtic myths and fairy-tales met and mingled with a sub-stratum of slave legends. My grandmother was but one generation removed from south Ireland and she knew by heart all the tales and superstitions of the folks, black or white, about her.(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

Regarding Aunt Mary Bohannon, she told young Robert about her life as a slave, and one of the first supernatural tales Howard tells Lovecraft involved the death of Aunt Mary’s master’s wife, the evil “Misses Bohannon”, who treated Aunt Mary and the rest of the slaves particularly cruelly:

As regards African-legend sources, I well remember the tales I listened to and shivered at, when a child in the “piney woods” of East Texas, where Red River marks the Arkansas and Texas boundaries. There were quite a number of old slave darkies still living then. The one to whom I listened most was the cook, old Aunt Mary Bohannon who was nearly white — about one sixteenth negro, I should say. Mistreatment of slaves is, and has been somewhat exaggerated, but old Aunt Mary had had the misfortune, in her youth, to belong to a man whose wife was a fiend from Hell. The young slave women were fine young animals, and barbarically handsome; her mistress was frenziedly jealous. You understand. Aunt Mary told tales of torture and unmistakable sadism that sickens me to this day when I think of them. Thank God the slaves on my ancestors’ plantations were never so misused. And Aunt Mary told how one day, when the black people were in the fields, a hot wind swept over them and they knew that “ol’ Misses Bohannon” was dead. Returning to the manor house they found that it was so and the slaves danced and shouted with joy. Aunt Mary said that when a good spirit passes, a breath of cool air follows; but when an evil spirit goes by a blast from the open doors of Hell follows it.(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

Adding on to Mary’s talk about supernatural things that happen when someone dies was his grandmother telling him about “… the yellow horse, the ghastly dream horse that raced up and down the stairs of the grand old plantation house where a wicked woman lay dying; and the ghost-switches that swished against doors when none dared open those doors lest reason be blasted at what was seen.”(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

The Stories Used for “Pigeons From Hell”

Both Howard’s Grandmother’s tales and Aunt Mary Bohannon’s stories helped him shape his story of “Pigeons From Hell”. Here, finally, are the individual snippets that Howard used to create the story:

From Howard’s Grandmother:

Sadly, Howard doesn’t relate any of the exact tales his grandmother told him about abandoned mansions and their horrible inhabitants in any of the letters that he drew from to create “Pigeons”. All we have is this brief mention in the letter where he also gives May Bohannon’s version:

                And in many of her tales, also, appeared the old, deserted plantation mansion, with the weeds growing rank about it and the ghostly pigeons flying up from the rails of the verandah.(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

From Mary Bohannon:

And here is the tale that formed the basis for “Pigeons”:

Another tale she told that I have often met with in negro-lore. The setting, time and circumstances are changed by telling, but the tale remains basically the same. Two or three men — usually negroes — are travelling in a wagon through some isolated district — usually a broad, deserted river-bottom. They come on to the ruins of a once thriving plantation at dusk, and decide to spend the night in the deserted plantation house. This house is always huge, brooding and forbidding, and always, as the men approach the high columned verandah, through the high weeds that surround the house, great numbers of pigeons rise from their roosting places on the railing and fly away. The men sleep in the big front-room with its crumbling fire-place, and in the night they are awakened by a jangling of chains, weird noises and groans from upstairs. Sometimes footsteps descend the stairs with no visible cause. Then a terrible apparition appears to the men who flee in terror. This monster, in all the tales I have heard, is invariably a headless giant, naked or clad in shapeless sort of garment, and is sometimes armed with a broad-axe. This motif appears over and over in negro-lore.(Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930)

Interestingly, the  spirit of the headless giant with the axe in the story seems to link the African-American legend to the Gaelic legends of ghosts and powerful spirits that Howard so loved to read about. In addition, it also lines up with the premise of the “murdered traveler” tale that he told Lovecraft, and that Howard believed must have originated in Scotland. Perhaps there was some great cross-pollination story-telling going on among rural White and Black Americans in the South.

Howard’s Thoughts on How to Write a Great Supernatural Tale

Just from these brief snatches of ghost stories and supernatural lore that Howard mentions, one can see that he had the basis for writing great horror stories in him. In a letter to Lovecraft in September 1930, Howard details his thoughts on what truly scares him in supernatural stories and how they should be written. Unfortunately, as he states in the letter, he fails to follow his own advice:

About that ghost-switches tale outside the door — that always struck me as being about the most grisly in its implication of any ghost-tale I ever heard — more so because of its nameless suggestions. The fault I find with so many so-called horror-tales (particularly including my own) is that the object of horror too swiftly becomes too solid and concrete. It takes a master of the pen, such as Machen and yourself, to create a proper suggestion of unseen and unknown horror. The illusive shadows lurking at the back of the brain are so much more monstrous and blood-chilling than the children of the actual mind. I’m not saying this like I’d like to say it. But the rustle of leaves when there is no wind, the sudden falling of a shadow across a door, the furtive trying of a window-catch, the sensation of unseen Eyes upon one, these give rise to speculations more monstrous and terrors more cosmically icy, than any chain-clanking apparition, or conventional ghost, that appears in full glory. When a writer specifically describes the object of his horror, gives it worldly dimensions and solid shape, he robs it of half its terrors. Somewhere, somehow, there must lurk in the dim gulfs of our racial memories, titanic and abysmal horrors beyond the ken of the material mind. For how else are we able to half conceive and fear entities we are not able to describe? Seek to draw their images for the conscious mind and they fade away. We cannot shape them in concrete words.(Lovecraft, ca. 1930)

Even though Howard failed to write his horror stories with the unspecific suggestions of the horrors that he wanted, most of his stories are still fantastic to read and provide some measure of goose-pimple raising in modern readers, just as he was affected by listening to ghost stories from his family and friends as a youth.

Sources

Letters

To H.P. Lovecraft: ca. Sept. 1930, ca. Sept. 1930 (later), ca. Oct. 1930, ca. Nov. 1930, ca. Oct. 1931

To Wilfrid B. Talman, ca. Oct. 1931

Text

Roehm, R. (Ed.) (2007), The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume Two: 1930-1932, REHFP

Websites

caoimhghin.weebly.com/coiste-bodhar-bean-sidhe–the-dullahan.html

Celtic and Druid Spirit Animals | The Powers That Be (shirleytwofeathers.com) ,

Cóiste Bodhar – Death Coach in Irish Folklore (yourirish.com)

Dullahan Dullahan

Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland – Thomas Crofton Croker – Google Books

Gancanagh | Warriors Of Myth Wiki | Fandom

John Bullard is a retired attorney who lives in Texas, and has updated The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard for The Robert E Howard Foundation Press, which will soon be available for purchase. He became a life-long Howard fan upon reading his first Howard story in an anthology of horror stories in 1974. While working on the Letters, he started seeing the subject matter of this post and has written it up for the education and edification of other Howard-ophiles. John is currently working on several projects for The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press.